Boaz

the tour bus thu-thunks past men with hand-scythes toiling in the wheat fields / I wonder if something could be gleaned from living the way they do / and in the distance the mountains of Mutianyu mount the horizon like shy giants in the mid-morning fog / are they getting closer I wonder but my mother translates the tour guide's Mandarin for me: "we have miles to go son miles before those giants come one step closer" / and then I am alone again / with the tour guide's Mandarin washing over me like the water of a baptism with the eyes turning to stare just like the eyes

of the aunties and uncles at my old

Chinese church / with the mountains not one step closer I realize there is no such thing as home but I think I came close to it the night I drove you back to the body where your ghost was staying the night we glided past the St. Croix and the bluffs that looked to me like questions and from the middle of nowhere gleaned a little bit of somewhere not fixed in space or time but suspended between our two childhoods like a tightrope-walker in the night